Project: nav - The Ruby Toolbox

Navigation made easy

Installation

System wide

gem install nav

In your Gemfile

gem 'nav'

Usage

Nav is writte for ActionView::Base and can be used in your rails views like so:

<%= nav do |n| %>
  <% n.action "Home", "/" %>
  <% n.action "Login", login_url %>
<% end %>

When rendered, this generates the following:

<ul>
  <li class="first current first_current">
    <a href="/">Home</a>
  </li>
  <li class="last after_current last_after_current">
    <a href="/login">Login</a>
  </li>
</ul>

It will determine the current page you are on and add the current class to the

element. Also, the element before and after the current element have the classes before_current and after_current Additionally, Nav will mark the first and last

element of the list as first and last. Like so, you can apply styles accordingly.

Adding attributes to the nav element

You can give any possible html option to nav, like id, classes, etc.

<%= nav :class => 'main' do |n| %>
  ...
<% end %>

Which results in

<ul class='main'>
  ...
</ul>

Adding attributes to an action

Disabling an action

You are able to add specific behaviour when defining an action. For instance, if you want to disable a specific element, you may pass disabled to it. It will add a disabled class to the li element.

<%= nav do |n| %>
  <% n.action "Disabled", "/", :disabled => true %>
<% end %>

Manually set the current action

In case want to define which of the elements is the current one. You can pass current as option. This can be done in various ways.

Boolean

<%= nav do |n| %>
 <% n.action "My special current", "/", :current => true %>
<% end %>

Regular Expression

Pass a regular expression to the :current: argument. For instance, the following will mark any url as current that has "account", followed by a "/" and any type of numeric value, like "account/1" or "user/account/123". However, "account/my" will not match.

<%= nav do |n| %>
 <% n.action "My special current", "/", :current => /account\/\d+/ %>
<% end %>

Proc

Pass a Proc in order to determine the current on the fly. Make sure that it returns true or false.

<%= nav do |n| %>
 <% n.action "My special current", "/", :current => Proc.new { !current_user.nil? } %>
<% end %>

Custom actions

If you prefer to not use links for your navigation or simply want to customize your navigation, you may do so by padding a block to the action.

You can use any rails view helpers or just good old plain html. The following examples are equivalent:

<%= nav do |n| %>
  <% n.action :class => 'customized' do %>
    <span>Home</span>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

<%= nav do |n| %>
  <% n.action :class => 'customized' do %>
    <%= content_tag :span, 'Home' %>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

... and will result in:

<ul>
  <li class="last">
    <span>Home</span>
  </li>
</ul>

nav

Runtime